Tweeting Teachers
The Chronicle of Higher Education raises an interesting question: should professors be tweeting with their students? Or is it a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction?
The Chronicle of Higher Education raises an interesting question: should professors be tweeting with their students? Or is it a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction?
The confusing spectacle of Judge Posner blogging about macro continues. His latest missive appears particularly misguided.
A new study by Angus Deaton uses an expansive dataset to analyze the determinants and benefits of religiosity around the world.
One of the people you’ll meet in SuperFreakonomics is a remarkable physician at Washington Hospital Center (WHC) named Craig Feied. He has had a hand in many technological innovations that are pushing medicine, hard, into the future (or at least the present).
My mother used to say in exasperation to my sisters and I, “For Pete’s sake!” Who is this Pete fellow and why is his name used in such an expression?
Just in case you weren’t sitting inside on this beautiful late-summer morning watching television over your breakfast bagel, you can see today’s Good Morning America segment on the Freakonomics paperback, here.
Marketplace, the economics program on National Public Radio, is running a fun series this week — asking economists to reflect on how thinking like an economist can shape your personal decisions. While the pieces are pretty light, it’s also a neat opportunity to teach some simple economics. Yesterday, it was my turn, and so I focused my economic lens on my marathon training. And thinking like an economist means thinking in terms of opportunity cost.
Jonathan Mann, the resident Freakonomics songwriter, is currently a finalist in mobile query service ChaCha’s music video contest.
It was during a trip to the Boston Science Museum that I had an idea about calculating statistical slumps.
Dallas’s police department changed the way it lines up its suspects for identification. Instead of the common “six pack” method where the victim looks at six photos at once, detectives (blind to who the suspect is) started showing the photos one at a time.
A reader named Christopher Rumney writes in with an interesting idea for how to discourage illicit performance-enhancing drugs in pro sports. Perhaps something like this has already been proposed, but I’ve not heard of it, and it’s certainly an interesting idea — although any players’ union in its right mind would likely rather blow itself up than submit.
We wanted to let you know that Dubner is scheduled to appear on Good Morning America this Thursday, Aug. 27.
This month’s Harvard magazine has a nice piece on the founder of the Smile Train, Brian Mullaney.
I love the way he runs his organization, and the way he tells it like it is.
Brian Wansink and Collin Payne recently examined the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and eating behaviors at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets.
In a trenchant Times Op-Ed, Michael Lynch explains, point-by-point, why the “peak oil” concept is so wrong.
The paperback edition of Freakonomics goes on sale today. As with the Revised and Expanded hardcover (which, we are told, will stay in print), it includes several of our New York Times Magazine columns; it doesn’t, however, include a chapter of blog excerpts.
The average horsepower of a new American car has more than doubled since 1980. You probably haven’t noticed, and most of this additional horsepower goes to waste.
A strange story has broken out in Sweden and Israel, with an article in Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper, by a journalist named Donald Bostrom.
According to The Times, Bostrom’s article “accuses the Israeli Army of harvesting organs from Palestinians wounded or killed by soldiers.”
Italian banks may soon accept fine wines and dry-cured hams as collateral on loans.
Of all the reasons anyone has ever had for getting breast implants, I’m guessing that no one ever thought of this one.
In the movie District 9, the aliens (“prawns”) have developed a tremendous addiction to cat food. A Nigerian gangster lives in the prawns’ preserve and has a monopoly on the sale of cat food to the prawns. How can he maintain his monopoly and what barriers are there to entry by other sellers?
Aldrin has agreed to take your questions — about NASA, walking on the moon, the value to society of space exploration, or anything else you can conjure — so ask away in the comments section below. As with all Q&A’s, we will post his answers here in a few days.
Megwalu emphasizes the importance of resolution on the ground, saying, “people may appreciate the arrest of persons like Thomas Lubunga of the DRC (currently held by the ICC), but if his arrest does nothing to rebuild trust in affected communities, and/or does nothing for the lady who lost a son to his brutal tactics but never gets to hear/see him account for his crimes, then little has been gained on the ground.”
I blogged last week about how progress in lowering the world record in the 100-meter dash has been extremely slow, even with the improvements in track surfaces, training techniques, steroids, etc. The world record has been lowered at an average of 0.1 percent per year over the last 40 years.
Brazil, a longtime leader in developing alternative energy for its transportation sector and its electricity, has recently discovered a truly gigantic supply of oil under its ocean waters.
Edward Glaeser (over at the Economix blog) and I have been writing about high-speed rail (HSR) over the past couple of weeks; he just finished his cost-benefit analysis of a hypothetical Dallas-Houston line with a look at land-use impacts. His overall conclusion, even making some very generous assumptions in favor of rail, is that the line would be a net cost to society of at least $375 million per year. This includes HSR’s potential environmental benefits as well as the direct gains to riders.
A couple of caveats are in order.
This is in spite of the fact that there have surely been technological advances in tracks and shoes, as well as expanding knowledge of weight training and fitness. The world’s population has increased substantially, as have nutrition levels, especially in developing countries.
The biggest puzzle to me is not how remarkable Usain Bolt is, but rather why it’s been so hard to get people to sprint faster.
Of the (very) many large topics on the Obama administration’s to-do list, one that has slipped off the radar of late is education reform. I assume Arne Duncan et al. are working hard and will retake the spotlight eventually, maybe even in a few weeks when a new school year begins. It will be interesting to see how much attention is paid to one of the most important, albeit touchiest, topics of school reform: teacher skill.
I don’t usually write about macro things. But a journalist asked me about the duration of unemployment, and I checked out how this recession compares to previous ones.
According to the FBI’s recently released second quarter Bank Crime statistics, bank robbers are most likely to rob a bank between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Friday; more robbers stated their demands verbally than by passing a note, and only 4 percent of incidents involved violence. The FBI also noted that, despite the recession, there were fewer bank robberies than last year.